Taxes go up, taxes go down (sometimes). Does it ever seems to make a real difference on the ground in your neighborhood? The typical temptation is to strive to cut costs and then reduce spending. What if instead of cutting spending we changed spending to create virtuous circles of savings and improvements?
I live in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, where we have 27 transit agencies and yet the 8th worst traffic in the US. What gives?
As I write this, the year 2020 is just days away. For years, plenty of corporate and civic initiatives carried names like “Vision 2020” or “Impact 2020.”
Many students who graduate high school and get accepted to college don’t matriculate at a two-year or four-year college. This scenario happens enough to earn its own name: summer melt.
In Silicon Valley, companies discuss and worry about their “technical debt.” That’s the friction caused by the accumulation of bad design choices, expedient compromises, avoided decisions, and postponed work.
Someone once asked business strategist and lapsed biologist Martin Reeves a simple question: How can I build a business that lasts 100 years?
Heavy rains and flood waters flow across the impervious surfaces of roads and parking lots. That flow pushes pollution on those surfaces–plastic bottles, cigarette butts, motor oil–into stormwater management systems. That pollution then dumps into lakes and streams. This system is how so much plastic ends up in our oceans.
I visited Estonia in the mid-1990s. Back then, I said it would be fascinating to return in 20 years and see what changed.
A recent World Economic Forum article stated that 90 percent of plastic pollution flowing in the ocean from rivers comes from just ten rivers. This statistic makes me incredibly hopeful about preventing plastic pollution and cleaning up our oceans.
We have elections all over the place: within companies, nonprofits, homeowner’s associations, kid’s sports league. Civic elections are a social good. As with all social goods, marketing principles apply to elections.